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CHAP. VI whole force was vaccinated or revaccinated. Diagrams XI. and XII. exhibit the result of the statistics presented to the Commission, showing for the Navy the death-rate from disease and that from small-pox for the whole force; and for the Army the death-rate from small-pox for the whole force, and that from disease for the home force only, foreign deaths from disease not being separately given.

Here we note, first, as in all the other communities we have dealt with, the general correspondence between the two lines of total disease mortality and small-pox mortality, resulting from the greater attention given to sanitation and to general health conditions of both forces during the last thirty or forty years. But, instead of small-pox mortality absolutely vanishing with the complete revaccination in the Army since 1860, it shows but a small improvement as compared with general disease mortality; just as if some adverse cause were preventing the improvement. In the Navy the improvement is somewhat greater, and more nearly comparable with that of general disease mortality. There is, therefore, as regards proportionate decrease, no indication whatever of any exceptional cause favourably influencing small-pox.

In diagram XII. I compare the small-pox mortality of the Army and Navy with that of Ireland from tables given in the Final Report and the Second Report; and we find that this whole country (at ages 15–45) has actually a much lower small-pox mortality than the Army, while it is a little more than in the Navy, although the mortality during the great epidemic was higher than any that affected the Army or Navy, owing to its rapid spread by infection in the towns. But the proportionate numbers dying of small-pox in a series of years is, of course, the final and absolute test; and, applying this test, we find that these revaccinated soldiers and sailors have suffered in the thirty-one years during which the materials for comparison exist, to almost exactly the same extent as poor, half-starved, imperfectly